Frustration

Greetings from China. I prepared a great post two days ago on Kyrgyzstan only to have it disappear into thin air. Frustration.

I had a huge wad of Uzbekistani money on leaving the Uzbekistan, but the currency exchanges at the airport refused to change it into US dollars because, shrugging, their computers weren't working. Frustration.

I want to buy a book about Central Asia here in Beijing, but Beijing has a lousy number of English-language book stores. Frustration.

Blogger, Flickr, BBC News, Wikipedia - all daily sites for me, are banned in this country. Frustration.

Planning my onward travel. Frustration.

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It's not all frustration however, Beijing is still a fun place to be in. Last night wandered upon a brand-new super mall called 'The Place' which features the largest TV screen I've ever seen, and probably will ever see, in my life. The previous evening was spent with locals at an area called 'Houhai' - a series of bars and restaurants about a lake. We visited 'East Shore Jazz Cafe' - Beijing's premier jazz club (one of the locals we were with was a jazz pianist herself).




So, in all, it's great to be back in China, civilisation, after the 'stans'. The stans were superb and I will write a more comprehensive post about them later. Really fantastic. In the mean time you can see my Kygryzstan and Uzbekistan galleries.

Xinjiang!

Greetings from the end of the line - the end of China at least, from the town of Kashgar. Few people here look genuinely Chinese, most of them are of Turkic origin (Uigurs).

In the time since I was last able to log onto my blog much as happened. We revisited the sand dunes - in the middle of the afternoon heat. They were fantastic again, but we were rather knackered.



We visited a town called 'Turpan' which is a grape growing oasis in the middle of the Taklamakan desert. That place was the first truly Uighur town that we visited, it has a very different feel from other Chinese cities - it's really like an extension of Turkey. What with the kebabs, breads, garb, hats, people, language, food etc. There wasn't much to do there other than relax under the grape trellises and to do day excursions to important Silk Road sites, such as the ancient ruined town of Jiaohe, which looks a heck of a lot like the setting from the original Planet of the Apes movie.





After Turpan was a bus ride through the desert, by the mountains to the reginoal capital 'Urumqi'. This is largely Uighur but there is now a majority Han Chinese population there who have migrated from Eastern China. Urumqi was pleasant enough, as was our hotel room which was a bargain at less that 5 pounds per night (each) for a 4 star room.



An obligatory day trip (or over night trip if you have time) is to 'Heavenly Lake' (Tian Qi) in the nearby Heavenly Mountains. The only description I'd heard of the place was that it might be disappointing to Europeans because its so similar to Switzerland. This apparently wasn't grounds enough to disappoint Rayner and I who climbed to the lake from the base (er, carpark) and were left in awe at the majesty of the place.



And now, finally, we endured what was actually a rather pleasant, comfortable, 24 train journey 1000kms west of Urumqi to the final frontier: Kashgar. We are here to witness its supposedly rather famous Sunday market - which is tomorrow.

That's all for now! Next stop: Kyrgyzstan!

PS Don't forget to visit Mike's Awesome Blog of Doom.